There was fixing of yet more xterm bugs! At least these were
mainly ones I introduced, so therefore I could find them.
:-)
Also much hacking on a new Gujarati renderer, which can
share something like 90% of the code with the Devanagari
renderer. Started making an appropriate font. Progress slow
due to not being able to read Gujarati.

Today

Stared lots at Gujarati glyphs and managed to cobble
together a couple of fonts that work. These have gone into
CVS.

Other indic hacking - I'm making all the Indic renderers
indicate invalid sequences better, and share more code
between them. And some other bits and pieces.

Got some feedback re: the Devanagari renderer and keymaps.
They work! (Apart from some minor glitches in the keymap).
Hopefully this means gtk HEAD will get translated into Hindi
soon.

The Future

I've arranged to go to the main UK office next week. Looking
forward to this, as I finally get to meet my boss.

Signed the contract yesterday, so I'm now officially
employed. :) Um, yay!

Xterm

Most of today was spent tracking down bugs in xterm. I fixed
the combining-doublewide characters interaction problem and
the consequent U+FFFF getting mangled issue, and some
potential security issues wrt the UTF-8 decoder.

The Killer Bug was the recently-tracked-down CutBuffer
problem. It's all icky and complicated, but related to the
fact that Xterm is exporting cutbuffers in UTF-8 and
then importing them in Latin1. This is clearly wrong, but
no-one
seems to know the right answer. I suspect I will make it so
it converts the exported strings to Latin1, as that, whilst
not good, is several million times better than the current
behaviour, which is of no use to anyone.

Some people have been recently talking about free Unicode
fonts. It might interesting them to learn of the ucs-
fonts project - which has extended many standard X11
fonts to a decent Unicode range. Soon, the -Adobe- pixel
fonts will also be ready to a quite large range.

If you have XFree86 4.0, you already have these fonts, and
a UTF-8 supporting xterm. Just type "xterm -u8 -fn 9x18u"
and lo! This doesn't support CJK or combining characters,
but you can get a patch for
that, which hopefully will be integrated into the standard
Xterm soon.

Obviously this doesn't support Indic scripts, however works
in ongoing on support for
Indic scripts in Pango, and will hopefully be ready for
1.0, along with a decent selection of pixel fonts for :
Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Burmese, Gujarati, Oriya,
and possibly other scripts.

OpenType support is more confusing, and something I'd
prefer not to have to do on my own. If anyone is interested
in collaborating on this issue, I'd strongly recommend
getting on the appropriate mailing lists, including
fonts@xfree86, and the linux-utf8.

Some folk also might be interested to learn a stab at a free
TrueType font editor exits. The main thing missing from
this is hinting. All that is needed for OpenType is editors
for Numerous Tables.

The Bill of Rights is far from unique. The Constitutions of
most countries guarantee certain rights. All member states
of the European Union are signatories to the European
Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits the abridgement
of lots of basic rights which weren't guaranteed by the Bill
of Rights
These rights include

The right not to be a slave (1865 in US)

The right not to be killed (still absent)

The right not to be tortured (as part of
investigation, not prohibited by US constitution, the 8th
amendment only applies to punishments)

The right to be presumed innocent until proven
otherwise (still absent, I think)

The right not to be discriminated against on grounds
of sex, race, colour, language, national origin,
association with a national minority (1920,
at least.)

The right to free and fair elections (1964)

The right to education (still absent)

So, whilst the United States's constitution is actually
pretty good today, it would be false to credit this to the
Bill of Rights, which didn't really contain anything that
was very radical (most of the points being enshrined in
English law at the time).

The current standard for C, is ISO 9899:1999, not :1990 The
standardisation work for this was done entirely by ISO
(which ANSI are a member organisation of, of course).

Life

Continued hacking on xterm to support CJK/Thai.
There is a strange selection crashbug still there, but I
can't reliably reproduce it. Debugging isn't helped by the
fact that the Xterm sourcecode isn't exactly the best
example of modular, well-documented code.

Continued hacking on Indic script support for Pango. I have
discovered my X server crashes when it tries to access a BDF
file with a longer-than-1024-chars-long line. Must find out
if XF86 4 does this and report it if so.

Need to if there is a standard Sinhala keyboard layout. This
seems to be just about the only Indic script that doesn't
fit well onto the Inscript keyboard layout that I'm using to
enter all the other scripts. (due to the prenalised stops).
Please let me know if you do...

Forgot to mention, was 21st birthday on the 26th. Now
can become an MP (although admittedly I'd have to persaude a
whole lot of people to vote for me first.)

Back in Leicester.

Sent the form off for a provisional driving licence
(which is needed in order to start learning to drive).

Myanmar (the script) turns out to be a lot more
interesting than I was assuming. The World's Writing
Systems as always
has basically everything needed, though. Probably the
ligature substitution engine will get a lot smarter by the
end of the week. Getting the funky [-style R to work will
not be fun though. In the unlikely event that anyone is
interested, here is some sample
output of the myanmar shaper

Degree - I got a 3rd. I am generally happy with this,
I was afraid I'd do better. For my project, I think I
got a 2:1, and I got a 2:2 for the recent exams, it
was the 1st semester exams that pulled me down. But
an honours degree is an honours degree, so I'm happy.
:)

Rendering of Indic Scripts - made quite a bit of
progress here, I've started a Bengali renderer based on the
Devanagari renderer. This has some new and interesting
issues to deal with (in particular, characters that map to
two glyphs, which occur on either side of another
character). After this is working, I'll pull the common code
into a library and make renderers for all the other Indic
scripts (apart from Tibetan, which still looks very
scary).